ABSTRACT
The First World War marked the first substantial military mobilisation for the Dominion of Canada and the Commonwealth of Australia, the largest and most populous of Britain's settler colonies. This chapter examines the correspondence generated by the voluntary and patriotic societies in Australia and Canada to reveal how time factored into the effort to mobilise human and material resources across space. Voluntary mobilisation might close the imaginary spaces between the home front and the front line, as well as between the imperial metropole and disparate peripheral communities of the dominions. Donors and volunteers in Australia and Canada participated enthusiastically in the process of wartime mobilisation, so long as they could contribute in their own time. The correspondence generated by the voluntary war effort reveals that the coordination of patriotic work was driven as much by the needs of soldiers overseas as it was by the motives of donors and volunteers at home.
